I dipped my chamomile tea bag up and down in the hot water, then did the only thing any logical girl e-mailing with a nice, handsome man would do. I googled him. I typed “Nate Gallagher” into the search engine and took a sip of tea. Lots of things came up. So many I wasn’t sure what to click first. There were multiple Nate Gallaghers in the United States. How could I know any of these pertained to the Nate I rear-ended?
I clicked on Google Images. Pictures loaded onto my screen, several of which were familiar—a man with olive skin, dark brown hair, light brown eyes, straight teeth, youngish, and very, very cute. The kind of cute girls not only noticed but couldn’t help commenting on. And he was e-mailing me, asking if he could help. I clicked on one of his pictures, which led me to a travel article written in 2009 on lesser-known towns in Ireland. I skimmed it enough to know it was well written (witty and charming), and sure enough, at the end where it talked about the author was the familiar picture, along with a bio. Nate Gallagher was a travel writer. Or at least he had been in 2009. Google showed me several other articles, all equally well written, all dated before 2011.
Facebook rendered no results. There were plenty of Nate Gallaghers, but none who were cute men living in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. I did find a profile on Twitter. After scrolling through almost two years’ worth of tweets (he posted once, maybe twice a month) that ranged from funny to serious to incredibly random, I started to feel very stalkerish and clicked out of the site. When all was said and done, here was what I learned about Nate Gallagher:
He was cute.
He was interesting.
He was a fan of the Philadelphia Phillies.
We shared the same faith.
I wondered if he’d come to the wedding as a friend of the bride or the groom. If the groom, he must have been a recent friend, since surely I would have remembered if someone like him had been friends with Matt in college. I sat back in my chair. I did need advice and I couldn’t really count on Rachel, seeing as she was now living in some remote village halfway around the world. And Nate had offered.
I clicked the Compose button, stared for a long while at the blinking cursor, took another sip of my tea, and started typing.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Date: Tue, Sep 15, 2015 10:36 p.m.
Subject: An Affair to Remember
Dear Nate,
I don’t know. Perhaps you can help me. It’s a pretty complicated situation. Or maybe it’s not and I’m only making it complicated. One thing is for sure: it is urgent. And since I have no idea when Rachel will get the message I sent to her in Fiji, I think I’ll take you up on your offer.
When I sent you that frantic e-mail, I had just finished delivering some flower arrangements to the public library in Apple Creek, which is a town not so far from my flower shop. Actually, let me back up a little. Earlier in the day, my brother stopped by to let me know he was going to propose to his girlfriend. It caught me off guard, mostly because they’ve only been dating since the end of May.
Anyway, as I was walking back to my car after dropping off the flower arrangements to the librarian, I saw my brother’s girlfriend with a man who definitely wasn’t my brother. Let’s just say they looked . . . awfully cozy. I was shocked. Absolutely shocked. And so I sent Rachel, or actually you, that frantic e-mail.
To make matters worse, my brother came back to the store this evening and announced that she said yes. Supposedly the two of them were to have dinner last night, but she had to cancel (to have dinner with another man!), so he went to her school (she’s a teacher) yesterday afternoon and proposed. I had no idea what to say. Or do. There’s not a single person on this planet I love more than my brother. He’s head over heels for this girl. This will absolutely crush him. But I have to do something. I can’t pretend I didn’t see what I saw.
So here I am, sitting in my kitchen with my cat in my lap and lukewarm tea by my elbow, feeling terribly conflicted and at a loss. What would you do if this were your brother?
With gratitude,
Amelia
PS: What has you procrastinating?
I brought my hands away from the keyboard. I had saved the subject line for last. At first I titled it She Done Him Wrong, one of Cary Grant’s earlier, lesser-known movies with Mae West, but then I got paranoid that Nate would have no idea what I was talking about and would simply think I had bad grammar. Not a good thing for a guy who had a sticker on his back window about the Oxford comma. I ended up deleting that subject line and changing it to one of Grant’s better-known films, even if it was an affair I’d rather forget.
I reread the message a few times, cracking my knuckles as I did. It was an unattractive habit, I knew, but some occasions simply called for knuckle cracking. Was I really going to send this? It was pretty personal information to send to a person I didn’t know. But maybe that was a good thing. Nate didn’t know me or my brother or his fiancée. He lived in the Upper Peninsula. There wasn’t really any harm in him knowing, was there?
The cursor hovered over the Send button. The sight of it made my hands clammy. Before I could chicken out, I squeezed my eyes tight and clicked.
From: [email protected]